New video!

Hey - I've been blogging to BUGS recently. Koo koo!

Sorry to everyone - I haven't been doing anything but working on this video recently. I think it turned out OK and I'd love for you all to check it out and leave your comments:

New PERCEIVAL video.

I have been unable to dig up my cell phone recently - every moment is spent doing Foley and fighting a battle with my computer. Although I have to admit, I did take a break last night and maked samosas. They were good, but the dough wasn't quite right. The mint-peach chutney worked out great though.

I am always amazed at the difference between how quickly a fantasy can be conceived and how much long and trying labor it is to achieve it. If it can be achieved at all. (Always thinking about fantasy...)

There is a Lou Reed song on "Velvet Underground" the album (I hope my readers are familiar - if not, get thee hence and download), a song that seems to be about... um... actually can't quite say. And the lyric goes:

"Between thought and expression lies a lifetime"

And that's TRUE. Of course, it's MORE TRUE because it's set to music. And truer still because you can dance to it. But that's what I'm trying to say - I don't know how it is for you, but my head is full of fantasies, most of which will never even be written down, let alone acted on. And only a tiny sliver of pie will become true. Is that my lifetime? Or, wait, is it the process including the unexpressed fantasies, or is the only thing that counts the thoughts that actually find expression? And what the hell do I mean by "counts?" Who's counting? (Mathmaticians certainly are.)

In cases like this, perhaps it is useful to look at the next line:

"Situations arise because of the weather"

Well, that didn't seem to help much. It sure was hot today though. Am I supposed to look deeper? Climate is predictable, but the details of weather aren't. Weather is chaotic. Thoughts, or we prefer saying fantasies, are the attempt of the mind to make sense of the world. Making sense means putting it in some sort of order. But there's always chaos. Without chaos each fantasy would become reality instantly. Wouldn't that be supernatural! Stupid to say stuff like that though. It always makes me angry when people say, "Without gravity, people would just float off into space." Wrong! Without gravity the Earth would explode like a balloon and the sun would be snuffed in a giant black supernova sneeze and, who knows, the universe would probably cease to exist. Nobody even knows what gravity is. What would the universe be without chaos? I can't even imagine. But when chaos stops me from getting my email, oh man, I don't care that the universe wouldn't exist without it. Just maybe I can keep those "situations" from arising long enough to get a few things done.

I know all of this is pretty swampy stuff. Pretty day to day. But I'm just trying to do "slow life" my way, trying to be stupid and foody. I like thoughts that spin around and around, but they make me dizzy and I want to say "stop, fantasies - you are alive now." But I'm not there yet. We'll see...

Anyway, the video. Take a look if you have time.

Hi/Bye

Can't sleep (magic spider)

The spider looks like an enormous tank.
I'm afraid of crushing her when I move things on my desk.
My computer is her happy hunting ground.
Bugs love my computer screen - they see it from the backyard at night.
Yes, it's a female spider (she's a working woman).
Her body must be very light.
She does "poses" with her fluffy yellow fangs.
Her symmetrical rows and columns of black eyes are quite intelligent looking.
She's only half an inch wide, but she's surprisingly tall.
Still, I think she qualifies as "eensy-weensy."
She's a "jumping spider" - no web.
Gnats and mosquitoes are terrified of her.
My mouse icon must look like a bug - she pounces on it.
You can't eat that, silly!
Wow! I can make you crawl around with my mouse.
You move with perfect grace and a kind of advanced contrapposto.
You don't so much jump as flick your body forward.
Don't crawl on me spider - I'm not your natural environment!
But I appreciate the company and respect.
(I promise not to fool you anymore.)

memories

I was thinking a lot about memory, because today is memorial day (soldiers chase me around my daydreams all the time, so I don't have to have a holiday for them - I'm already terrified). I think they should actually change the holiday to "aren't memories strange and intense? day." I think it could happen...

Well, I guess I was just thinking about memory because I went up to Bard College where I went to school for my brother's graduation and to drink and dance a lot. I love dancing the most and my brothers and their girlfriends do too. I have to say - I love my brothers so fucking much. And their girlfriends too. But the campus does somehow haunt me - the people who I used to know quite well, and the people who aren't around anymore get pushed up against me. I don't believe in ghosts, but I sure do believe in getting haunted. I was thinking how I've changed and how I've stayed the same, and I think the most powerfully disturbing haunting was by the ghost of my former self. By which I mean that brains are net-shaped patterns that change in detail and connection and pathway strength. The unused paths slowly fade out and become mostly dead, or at least as dead as background static is. When there is an overwhelming amount of input, these ghostly paths light up again, and my mind is possessed by a low-power, low-fidelity replica of myself as I was before. This replica is not of me at any time, but is a collage of my past selves, each part triggered by some strong sensation associated with a memory - the smell of local summer flowers, the quality of the shadows in a certain place, the evidence of my passing on the walls of buildings, a certain tree I loved and painted, an old aquaintance's verbal mannerisms. But especially the land and the paths through it trigger me, perhaps it is because the resemblance to the neural pathways creates some kind of amplification through feedback?

Anyway, this is not an altered state, but it is like being occupied by a different person. It's all about content. Because the contents of your mind at any one moment - that is one way of saying who you are.

And the feeling resembles the overwhelming feelings of deja-vu and petite panic attacks I used to get in Osaka in 2001-2. And those were partially triggered by the dream diary I was keeping intensely while working a swing shift twice a week. My bed was surrounded on three sides by my drawings, notes, and dream diaries taped to the wall, and it was pretty intense, especially since I was having trouble making friends. So I started having difficulty distinguishing between dreams and reality - not all the time, just when I was sleep-deprived or spacey or sometimes while meditating. In zen these distracting hallucinations are called makyo - 魔境 - which uses 魔 - the kanji with the most strokes that I can write which can mean "magic." Anyway, I was able to overcome these by making good choices (i.e. stopping the dream diary and taking the drawings down and not drinking genki-drinks and sudafed pills to stay awake) and with a little help from my friends.

But the thing is - these makyo resembled the strange feeling of being haunted or possessed by memories. And I always described them as intense deja-vu, which is a kind of false memory. So what does this have to do with remembering dreams by using a dream diary?

So, dear readers, have you ever writ your dreams down? Regularly? What was it like? Was it intense?

Memorial day

I had a strange dream about men with cybernetic hands made of yellow sand, pretzel rods, and rusted rebar. They were in a first-person shooter environment. I was. There were three bad guys - a tall hollow-faced one, a broad-shouldered troglodite, and a supernormal business-man. I tried to attack them on a bushy desert plain. But they weren't hurt, only annoyed and I ran away, but of course they found me. I thought that they were going to kill me and I was afraid that it was going to be painful, but I was resigned to it because running from them was so terrifying. But it turned out that they were actually bodhisattvas, that they were good and it was me who was the bad guy. And they said that the game was over, and it didn't hurt at all, the desert switched off and my character was in a blinky nintendo-game-colored flat background. And some of my fingers were taken away and replaced by pretzel-rods and rebar because I had injured the world and so had destroyed myself and my ability to do good. It didn't hurt but it was shameful. And I was reborn in a different branch of the multiverse, where men had created a much more ideal planet, a green planet, by borrowing against good by burying a network of huge radioactive heavy-water-filled tubes deep in the earth. Deuterium? Tritium? And I was not myself. I opened the one tube gate that met the San Francisco Bay. And for a split-second I could see twisted creatures in the sharp crystal water through a round window, the gravity-defying vertical surface of the heavy-water tube. Then it exploded outward into the ocean, and millions of see-through men ran away from it, running on top of the water, but the heavy water came in an exploding wave and swept around the tiny planet, around the cities on the shore, swallowing all the creatures I had seen in turn, and lastly the three bad guys. And the earth became a perfectly featurless nintendo-game-colored sphere floating in an empty sky. And that was all there was because I was the sphere.

Infinity Echo Chamber

It doesn't have any size. But theortically there is a wall at the far end for sound to bounce off of. But who cares? I'll be dead before infinity, that's for sure. But we don't have to go to infinity. How about just down to the market and back - that should be far enough to kill the sound. And what about the air-conditioners whirring and the planes coming in for a landing at Newark? That's the problem with math I think. And I don't know what math is, but I don't know what art is or I am and I talk about these things all the time, so I can't bother to ask your forgiveness. Somebody should take the mathmaticians and say to them, "Look - these equations are really gorgeous, like some kind of extradimentional chandelier, but you need to look at the world!" Like taking a bad dog to where it made a mess. I've been trying to measure sloppy pencil lines and divide them by threes and two using a metal ruler long enough to understand that intuition thrives on a diet of imprecision. Intuition and joriki - meditation-powered mindlessness power. With all variables accounted for that extreme unselfish self-confidence disappears as it's imprecision is seen as inexacitude. Wrongness. There can be no imagination. But rulers fail on dubious lines and crumpled paper and on fudges and cheats. That's the real world - tree's roots grow around rocks and sometimes through them. Because breaking the rules is the key to creative action. What math makes sense? Estimation. But this should be a year at school and involve cliffdiving and trying to kiss people for the first time to emphasize the difference between zero and one. It is an unexplored branch of mathmatics that really makes me sore. Because math, being a made-up way of looking at the world, should take into acount these ten fingers and tell me why five should round up to ten. Well, there are certainly occassions where 5 becomes 8 to match the beat, or where five sticks out like a sore thumb but 5.3333333333333 clicks into a perfect whole. And there are times where zero and one are interchangeable, and where nine is one and zero at the same time, the only difference being that one is mirrored. I am not being mystical, I am just giving examples of numering systems I have had to use to create the animations for Perceival. Because number theory is as much of a mind game as art theory. And how about identity? Did you know that at the subatomic level, when you have two particles, it is impossible to switch them. They are separate, but they don't have identities, so one could be the other it is impossible to tell and a waste of thought to care. So what about infinity? Where are the consequences? The physical pain, the having to stop for food, the breath? Physics really fixed itself up good when it discovered the Heisenberg uncertainty principal - that down at the tiniest levels precise measurement is impossible. That you can measure one attribute of a particle, but not the other. This is pointing at the real. And big surprize, the universe isn't drawn on graph paper. So now physics is coming apart at the seams, and there is a place in the equations for an observer to tie it all together, which does tend to complicate matters by pointing to the mess, and that seems right. So what I am waiting for is someone to find the magic bullet for math. Blow it up! I want to see what color it burns! Because the biggest mystery is not that some people can find the square root of huge numbers in their heads, but that people can add two single-digit numbers and get the WRONG ANSWER.

Composit... I mean, COMPOSING (er, compost?)

Today I dug some dirt and I composed a song.

Here's the mp3:

Cubic Zirconium.

The mp3 sounds dirty, doesn't it? Muddy and staticky. Too bad. I want Chester to fix it up for me.

I also need to speak to someone who understands notes. Are there too many notes at the end? I want there to be a lot, but not too many. After you explain notes to me, please explain what is major and minor keys. Major sounds happy. Minor sounds sad. It's fun to mix them up. I only really know one chord - C major. When you take away some white notes and play black notes into that C major chord that makes it sad. And then you find a pattern-shape to bring it back into a C major chord one emotion-state at a time. The path of sound-pattern-induced emotions you go through from happy to sad is the story of the fantasy in your heart language. It almost always sounds best on xylophone, marimba, vibraphone, or glockenspiel. Is there any other way?



I have been neglecting... everything... so I can make these videos. It's not "worth it" - it's just the way I do things. But I'm so thankful that my friends leave traces here and there - I want to follow all the paths and one day I will leave my room and go roaming. Just not today. Or tomorrow.

New Perceival Post

Hey there -

I didn't post for a few days - I was super busy finishing the next video for Perceival. I know it doesn't seem like a lot of work, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I got ultra-frustrated on Monday when a mysterious glitch stopped me cold, but I didn't blog out my frustrations or my voodoo theory of complicated technology. That's a first!

This video is a bit longer and structured around the song I posted here a few days ago. I think I am going to try to scale back the musical element in the next one. Also, this one required the most drawing, and it was really too much - these are supposed to be more like sketches. So hopefully the next one will be easier for me and therefore get released faster. I am well into the foley though - it's fun to record and edit and it really adds a lot.

Anyway, anyone still left standing, please go to the Perceival site and leave your comments. If you want to follow-up with your older comments, that's OK too.

nature kick

I went up to Purchase to watch Chester graduate with my family. Someone has a DVD set of "Planet Earth" - the BBC documentary series. Of course it is completely amazing. I remember that the EPN was on a nature-kick for a while, and anyway, I've got to say that this should be required viewing...

There are two main things I was thinking about while watching. The first, and much less universally significant, but interesting to me as an artist, is how this documentary is given dramatic structure that seems influenced by hollywood conventions. Each story in the series is turned into the conventional storytelling arc, with a clear problem that leads to a climax - sometimes this is just a dressing-up of a story that was really playing out in front of the cameras, but at other times it is artificially constructed - even if remaining true to the reality of the situation. This injection of entertainment value is accomplished through narration, the sheer wealth of raw footage available to the editors which allows them to use hollywood conventions such as the establishing shot and extreme close-ups to accentuate emotional reactions, and the anthropomorphization of the animals - although one of the profound lessons of this series is that much animal life is as complicated socially as our own so perhaps this is more of a reverse anthropomorphosis - an animalization of humanity? (This also lead me to think about how much of my exposure to animals has been to that of the cartoon variety, a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon - that we are attracted to "cute" animals - kudos to the show for actually discussing these issues in the last episodes). The most obvious method used to dramaticize the show is the sound - both through a sound track that ranges from symphonic cry-fests to creepadelic contemporary noise experiments - it never drops to the level of grand kitch, but it comes rather close. The foley - the addition of sound effects that mimic the real sounds - also has been given deep attention and is particularly effective. These add up to create an artificially-constructed plot that seems simultaneously more real and more fictional than less expensively produced nature shows (this effort by the BBC is said to be the most expensive of it's kind). This raises a larger question, one that I am always dealing with, which is that fantasy is a huge part of our everyday life. People can't observe things without incorporating them into the grand story of their life or constructing eleaborate fantasies about what is happening. Anthropomorphization is one aspect of this primal urge, but our self-conception is as well, a conclusion I've read over and over again from neuroscientists, and zen teachers and experienced directly myself while observing my own mind (and yes it's obvious I've not get gotten through). I discussed some of these ideas with Chester, who was particularly aware of what the producers were doing with sound, and I would not have noticed these things if it were not for him.

The other thing that was on my mind of course is the environmental destruction humans have caused. If anyone can watch this doucumentary and not feel this lesson at a profound level, then I don't understand how they think at all (not that I don't respect them and want to understand how they think, but just that I can't empathize with someone who thinks so differently than I do and a lot of explaining would be required). I'm a person who doesn't put my faith in any idea very easily, and I tend to dwell in the details of how to understand day to day life rather than point our grand truths about "why" questions that may be interpretated morally, but it is impossible for me not to interpret the ideas in this show as anything less than a grand injunction to not destroy the environment. In the episode "ice worlds" there is a story about a polar bear that is so overwhelmingly heartbreaking that I can't stop thinking about it. But my interpretation of the situation leads me a more profoundly upsetting idea - the polar bear is starving and desperately needs to find food or he'll die. For him, food is a baby walrus, but the baby walrus doesn't want to die either and the walruses fight back with all their power. What is nature but an endless cycle of struggling and death? What caused chemicals on this planet to line up to form these complicated things that have feelings and desires and that don't want to die? Where does that desire come from? Is there any alternative? What can be done about the neverending cycle of desire and suffering? And specifically, what about my role in it? Why do I feel so sad about it? What is that sadness? Am I morally responsible? What does it mean to be morally responsible? It seems as though action is required, right? What actions can I take? Or are actions insignificant - would it really make a difference if the polar bear situation had a different ending? If so, why didn't the film crew intervene? If this is not where the true significance lies, what about the fate of an entire species? Is this any different or is it just a change in magnetude? What about my fate? What about my life is any different from the polar bear's life? Is it possible to stop the cycle just inside myself? Or is the urge to stop it just a part of its continuation? Is focusing on myself approaching the solution to the problem, or is it misled - just part of the continuation of environmental destruction through apathy? Is the true solution external? Taking action? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I think they are important. I'm pretty sure that these questions were not raised directly in the show, but they were highlighted in my mind by the show and so I must say that this show is truly meaningful and may be one of the great art pieces of our time.

I am having a lot of trouble sleeping lately - I can bearly type - so forgive me if this post is a little wild. But with these impossible questions sometimes it is difficult to think clearly. The mind can seems pretty wimpy and get all scattered and full of holes. I think this is somewhat similar to thinking about the solution of a koan - any impossible questions will do, but koans are impossible questions that at first glance appear insignificant and uninteresting, whereas the questions "Planet Earth" led me to ask myself are obviously relevant and would seem to have some kind of practical or logical solution that requires action. But perhaps this is wrong. A koan can lead to enlightenment, but maybe the kind of impossible question that's been on my mind leads to something else...

New Song for Perceival

This song is called "stopping by the woods on a snowy evening." You can use it for your book report kiddies!

Only the following lines are relevant. You have to chose your battles!

He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake,
The only other sound's the sweep,
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

BY ROBERT FROST (A little bird told me to credit this - thnx)

Yes, only one of the last two lines is relevant. But which one?

Can you hear what I mean? Of course, there are problems with the way it sounds, the balance, peaking and all. But I'm not a music-man like Chet or Dan. That said, I like arpeggios. A lot. And anything that resembles a xylophone.

I woke up, started working on this song, and now it is 11:39. Whoops! I am planning to use it for the next animation, which I am quite excited about indeed! Not all of the animations are going to be set to music (blat isn't), but it is gratifying to put these song somewhere. I've dozens of songs from my psr 550 days. Some more of which can be found here.



download mp3

Whew! I'm in an exhaustion trance. I have bits of thoughts flying around.
Music sounds amazing with headphones - computer whirring noises drive me bonkers. Or rather - there certainly are some amazing musicians out there. I wonder if the human mind is equipped to handle recorded music? It is so intense. Sometimes it makes me feel like I'm shrinking down. I could get into the Butthouse then. (I'll explain that sometime - flowers of disgust reference) I sometimes think music can be terribly dangerous. Some of these modern singers especially. What I want to know - has there ever been a study done to see whether you can "catch" depression or other mental illnesses? Because they are just a configuration, a systems-map of mind function. I know I can "catch" people's gestures and this helps me understand who they are... But sometimes I feel music creating these terrible small loops in my mind - I guess that's what holes are, anyway...
What is the difference between singing and playing music? Is that easy? There's a vibration that makes singing honest. Even if you aren't honest, people will see how you are not honest. And it regulates your breathing. That's why you might get really small and go into a hole.
I hope kensho isn't just religious ecstacy. I've never heard anyone compare the two. The descriptions I was reading in "The three pillars of Zen" are the most exciting I've ever heard. But I think they are dramaticized. Or selected by the Western mind of the writer. I thought zen was supposed to be boring and elitist. Why do I want it to be? I just don't want it to have anything to do with speaking in tongues or being high or makyo when I get really confused about what's a dream and what's real and I get panic attacks and deja-vu at the same time and can shoot lazers out of my eyes or anything like that. I understand there are different mental configurations, different states of consciousness. I don't want kensho to be one of these. I want it to be more different than these things.
Now I'm actually asleep.

New video

I finished the new video and I re-designed the blog as well.

Perceival blog.

It's been an exhausting day.

Dumn

Blogger is annoying for formatting.
YouTube is annoying for not allowing links.
FinalCut is annoying for thinking there is no memory available when there is.
People are the most annoying thing.
Robots are pretty annoying too, but not as much as people.

Improvements

Now featuring non-microscopic text!

The great debate among the various factions of synesthetic superscam is whether the black background sucks or not. I think it is awesome. It's like really tough. Like "The Crow."

I am asking this because I am busy re-making the blog for Perceival. So I'm thinking about blog even more than ususal. Which is not much, cause I don't think a lot.

Anyway - what changes should I make here?

New Blog

I just launched a new blog for the video project "Perceival" I've been working on. It's a big deal, but I'm making a small deal out of it on this blog 'cause I want to keep that blog a thing apart.

Anyway, check it out:

www.perceival.blogspot.com

Singing

I was listening to that song "A Pair of Brown Eyes" by the Pogues. I was thinking a lot about war since I played paintball last week - how nobody is making art or music about it, or how I'm not... And well, this song makes me think a lot of things... Plus, what the fuck do I know about war? But isn't there anyone who knows something about war who is willing to talk about it?

I found a great analysis on this mp3 blog I love called "moistworks," but it's buried in this huge page, so I copied the analysis into the comments here....

It's an amazing song because it moves between the realities of the guy sitting in the pub, and the fantasies he latches onto inspired by the music he's listening to. Pretty amazing - somehow psychedelic because it's dealing with the altered state - drunkeness - and how your mind works differently. Lots of swaying. Kind of like free-association, but not with thoughts, with emotions, where the reality of the song's emotional content is more real than where the singer is... But of course it's not like it's artsy postmodern tripe - it's a great song to sing without instrumentation, by yourself, to your dog, when your car's most important part is busted....

Anyway, the singer makes references to all these differrent songs, and that other blog seems to have figured out that it talks about, but at one point the lyrics go:

"An old man in the corner sang
where the waterlilies grow..."

But that's supposed to be a song title. I couldn't find the mp3 of the song, though I could hear 20 sec.s on iTunes - WTF? Isn't there any place where people can find old tunes or folk music for free? It's folk music! It's the original copyleft!

But I did find the sheet music. I am proud when I can find info that isn't elsewhere...

I'd like to learn how to sing this song - can anyone help me? Because I want to be an old man. And because, well, I've downloaded about a million songs, and they don't make me happy. I want to learn to sing songs that don't require instruments so I can sing anytime, so I can have the information in mh head and nobody can accuse me of stealing it. I hate how modern music alway requires instrumentation. The voice is of course the most amazing instrument - almost everyone has it and it's free and loud and easy to use and I think it is also the healthiest, and all these mp3s are making me sick in the head.

By the way, booze isn't always so cool, kids - check out this interview with Shane MacGowan...

But that whole album is amazing. That last song (which in a similar fashion is structured around that song "Waltzing Matilda") addresses what is going on in my country more profoundly than anything I've heard anyone say. But I'm not going to put it up here, because eventually I'm going to get busted for posting music, so I guess I'll just urge you to find it yourselves...

Starry Nite 2007

Click on image to enlarge!

This image is from the end of that last video. I fooled around with it a bit in photoshop. I call it "MOLD STARS" because it was made by taking still images of mold growing on my bathroom ceiling. I like how it is random-looking but follows a kind of hidden organic pattern. Fractalesque. Anyway, to get this pixel effect it's best to trick photoshop by changing the image size and resampling using "nearest neighbor" rather than using the pixellate filter, which produces a more boring effect. The strange thing is that stars in a galaxy also follow a fractal pattern. (It's worth enlarging because otherwise you can't see it - but if yu want to complain about compression, I can do that all day.)

You can also see this image in the following video, which was an early precursor to the "Perceival" project. Isn't the song creepy?

The thing is - I'm not an idiot. I know that most of you care not a shit about using photoshop or what I did today or anything. If we met in real life I would understand when you were bored. I would know when to shut up. I just thought you should know that. Plus I don't really care about anything, least of all whether my blog thrills you or not. The blog writes itself. I am trying to deal with things the best way I know how.